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12 April 2012

Mapping Vacancy To Initiate Temporary Uses

leerstandsmelder.de
is a website that maps vacant buildings in German cities. The project was
initiated by students of architecture in Hamburg a more than a year ago when
they mapped the vacant buildings of a derelict area in Hamburg, the Gängeviertel.
After a year the project was expanded throughout Germany and currently
maps vacant buildings in Hamburg, Berlin, Bremen, Kaiserlauten and Frankfurt.
Due to broad coverage in local media, Leerstandsmelder Berlin could
accumulate more than 220 entries within the last two weeks. And the numbers are
steadily growing.

On their homepage, the initiators plead for
more transparency and enabling spaces (in the Sitauationist or Cedric Priceian
sense) in the city as the motivation for setting up the vacancy index. They
expect that with their service, more temporary uses and discussions about the
buildings fate are kicked off. The
open-source platform, is a collectively generated pool offering also
information beyond the mere location like information on ownership or how long
the building has been vacant. In Berlin iconic buildings like the Eisfabrik
at the banks of river Spree or the Haus
der Statistik are listed as well as supermarkets, former administration
buildings, hospitals,
prisons,
shopping
malls and listening
stations from the Cold War. Even the soon-to-become-vacant Airport Tegel,
which faces an uncertain future, is listed on the map.

The question remains, if the initiators
good intention to spark the many vacant buildings with new energy and temporary
uses works out or if the maps also become a valuable resource for investors to
find affordable land and transform the vacant lots to luxury condominiums as of
course many of them are in gentrifying areas. In any case the maps are a resource for
urban explorers and feed well into recent discussions on Ruin
Porn.

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The city is made up of assemblages built of heterogeneous networks and associations. Multiple and overlapping enactments constitute urban life as a synchronous city.SYNCHRONICITY is a blog excavating these networks and setting them in relationship to each other. SYNCHRONICITYunderstands itself as an extended platform sharing myriad approaches in urbanism, landscape and architecture.